Facebook deletes 103 pages, groups and accounts linked to Pak army's media wing

Facebook has taken down 103 "assets" - pages, groups and accounts - linked to employees of Pakistan Army's media wing and involved in "coordinated inauthentic behaviour", the social media giant said on Monday.

The company - which shared details on "four separate, distinct and unconnected" takedowns linked to both Pakistan and India - said it had removed the pages, accounts and groups set up by the networks "for violating Facebook's policies on coordinated inauthentic behaviour or spam".

"Today we removed 103 pages, groups and accounts for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook and Instagram as part of a network that originated in Pakistan," said a statement issued by Nathaniel Gleicher, the company's head of Cybersecurity Policy.

The coordinated inauthentic behaviour is when groups of pages or people work together to mislead others about who they are or what they are doing.

"Although the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their identities, our investigation found that it was linked to employees of the ISPR (Inter-Service Public Relations) of the Pakistani military," the statement said.

There was no immediate comments from the Pakistan Army on the issue.

Quoting Gleicher, Dawn newspaper said, "the takedown is because there is this network of fake accounts that they are using to conceal their identity and make these pages look independent, when in fact they are not."